


enc 2112: the course of true love

by orphan_account



Category: The Social Network (2010)
Genre: College, Drunk Texting, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-10
Updated: 2015-01-10
Packaged: 2018-03-07 00:22:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3153836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which the quality of Chris Hughes' life would have been greatly improved if everyone he went to college with hadn't slept through Comp. [Alternatively: how Chris secures Mark's future happiness using a handy combination of innate social engineering talent, deontological quotes, some Romantic poetry, and a few well-placed Postimpressionist postcards.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	enc 2112: the course of true love

**Author's Note:**

> This ended up being really insular and navel-gazey--and for that I would like to very sincerely apologize. It really was supposed to be a funny story about how Chris charges in and saves the day because Shakespeare knows all the love stories, but somehow it didn’t end up that way (but maybe one day I will write that story, too).

The funny thing about Dustin, despite his complete and utter lunacy, is that he read harder things in college than _Charlie and the Chocolate Factory_.  ( _This is Charlie Bucket. Hello, Charlie Bucket. This is Mr. and Mrs. Bucket. Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Bucket._ Chris thinks he threw less-than-socially-acceptable sharp objects at Dustin’s head once he got to _Hello, Grandpa Joe and Grandma Josephine_. Dustin was an agile little bastard.)

 

The funny thing about it was that, despite Mark’s utter ignorance about the humanities, he didn’t need to take English classes to quote Shakespeare. 

The funny thing about it was that, when Eduardo began dating a girl who didn’t wear scarves, there was nothing funny about it at all.

 

Chris’ room at Kirkland was probably the messiest neat room in the building. Their shared suite carried the residual crumbs and stains of four boys living together, but his section (carved out, mind, after a particularly furious series of passive-aggressive ‘ _excuse me i think you left your box in my room let me move that for you_ ’ exchanges) stayed crammed with papers and books, with a few sweatshirts thrown over the bed.

It wasn't too bad. Nobody dared venture into Dustin’s room, for fear of what they’d find--a bed made of pixie stix? the Ark of the Covenant?--and nobody went into Mark’s room, because nobody’d seen the floor of his room since he moved in. Chris demarcated his territory piles of looseleaf lecture notes and books with colored sticky notes. He didn't use special pens or anything, he’s not a weirdo. But he did take a quiet kind of pride in jotting little things down and removing them after a job well done.

His suitemates told him that it was weird, that he's weird, but he’s not going to take that to heart. Not from them.

 

His first lit course was suspiciously easy. Chris bitched about it privately, about the limited views of his professor who drones on and on about the Catholicism running rampant in mid-20th century American literature and how it was an important point to remember when discussing the main themes of art and life and death. He took notes to look like he’s paying attention while staring at the back of someone’s head, otherwise searching around for a single friendly (or attractive) face.

While the rest of the class struggled through 'Tintern Abbey', Chris marked in his pages of _Leaves of Grass_ and rejoiced in words, quietly and privately. When he'd finished the book, neat handwriting underlining passages and soft yellow highlighter marking phrases, he handed it to a cute, undercaffeinated boy in line for morning coffee.

The only bit of assigned poetry he liked at all was 'Dover Beach', when he'd read it alone in the library for the first time. Chris took it in, quietly breathing to the rhythm of pure words. It was the only piece of honest writing he’d encountered so far, and Chris always did place a high premium on honesty ( _begin and cease, like a tremulous cadence slow_ \- poetry began _bringing the eternal note of sadness in_ ).

He'd photocopied his textbook’s pages about Matthew Arnold and stickied it all in purple, passing his first lit course with the highest grade in the class.

 

Christopher Hughes, the professional, can still recite 'Dover Beach' by heart. It’s one of the things that never leaves you--and when the bright lights of the office threaten to pulse his headache further in, he takes a deep breath and navigates away from his inbox. Reaches for a book. He no longer litters his space with looseleaf and sticky notes (although sometimes he wishes he still had the freedom to do so, in the same part of him that wants to eat candy before going to bed). It’s soothing, at times. Chris, just Chris, pulled along the threads of _come from holy fire, perne in a gyre, and be the singing masters of my soul_.

 

His second lit class in the spring semester was just as easy, and began at an abominable 7:15 in the morning. The instructor’s TA was cute, but that’s all Chris takes away from the course at all--another grade to buoy to his GPA, another series of papers, and the TA’s phone number scribbled eagerly down behind his last term paper. (He did call him, but their irrevocable differences on Tolstoy brought the relationship to a hasty close.)

Sometimes Chris thinks that Mark and Dustin could benefit from the humanities. Could be better humans by studying the liberal arts. After all, Dustin was malleable enough to curiously study alien subjects--as in, actual extraterrestrial life--but Chris quickly amends the thought after the memory of Dustin struggling to program through a haze of pizza-beer-Everclear. He’s still pretty sure that <ASD;LFJ> isn’t coding anything.

 

Chris’ sophomore year had begun one chapter of his life while closing another. It was, on reflection, the best of times (the worst of times were soon to follow, because every human, Chris knows, needs _hamartia_. Every story needs _catharsis_ at the end.) He'd inexplicably fallen in love with Ernest Hemingway, and when he’s kissing a boy with plush lips and dark eyes, was dreaming of the Spanish sun. He'd marked his copy of _A Moveable Feast_ while the rest of the class slogged through Steinbeck and Fitzgerald, devoured  _Hills Like White Elephants_ while the class tried Melville.

He kept his Hemingway collection small, like a secret, battered paperbacks with yellow pages picked up for a song because of the inherent value of their words. Chris read  _The Old Man and the Sea_ when Dustin and Mark talked about going to the AEPi Caribbean party. (Well, Dustin talked about it. Mark slouched, which was discussion enough.)

 

Eduardo fit into their group like he was born into it. Chris had been his tiny little room just once, hollow with the empty space of too-less, and felt better when he'd seen him slack-jawed and napping on their couch of questionable materials.

Eduardo was the one to pull Mark out of coding binges; got him to shower and sleep and eat like a functioning human; coaxed him to look people in the eye instead of stubbornly curling into himself. Eduardo opened Mark up and it used to show, showed when they all went out and Dustin while crashed and burned at the bar, while Chris ushered him away from the girls. When Eduardo had an arm slung around Mark’s (surprisingly straight) shoulders--it was comfortable. Together, it felt relaxed.

It really was the best of times.

 

“Chris? Chris?!” Dustin waves at him, concerned eyes boring into his own with laserlike strength. He pushes Dustin’s hands away from his face, lest they punch into his nose by accident.

“What - “

“Mark is gonna kill us,” Dustin whispers, hands reaching out to cup Chris’ face. Or pinch him, Chris can never tell. He blocks Dustin’s grabby hands with practiced ease and a sigh.

“Why is - “

“Eduardo is coming, Eduardo is going to be at the thing and Mark will be there and Chris Mark is going to kill us, he’s gonna kill us or he’s gonna kill Facebook and we’re all gonna die -“ In panic, Dustin's words overlap with his. 

“The thing? The event on -“ 

“Yeah, industry in a functioning -“

“Friday?”

 

Sometimes, Chris and Dustin are a conversational hurricane. Dustin is usually the tempest and Chris the eye of the storm, but when they crash together to the same conclusion Dustin slumps on Chris’ desk and whines. “The function is Friday, we can’t have him disappear. He has to go,” Chris breathes, body ready to enter crisis mode. Dustin looks at him, wild-eyed and nervous. “And we’re going to go with him.”

 

In the middle of their sophomore year, the realization that Mark must be in love hit Chris over the head. Mark could Refuse To Look At You for a myriad of reasons, but when he’s coding or just looked at Wardo, Chris didn't even exist in the room. Mark was in love--not with code, not with Red Bull or Twizzlers--but a Brazilian-American boy with stupid hair and a head full of risk calculations.

( _There are as many kinds of love as there are hearts_.)

 

They crashed the servers and it felt like a party, it felt festive and _faire la nouba_ and electric. Nobody knew how far it will spread but Mark, who had everything (and nothing) to prove, had cracked his knuckles and wiggled his fingers like a stage magician. Wardo’s algorithm stayed on the window: mathematical magic.

Chris kept a running count of the days Mark has been in love and hasn’t realized it yet. Mark doesn’t know--can't know, because if he did know he’d do something about the close, tense air between Wardo and himself--about the empty space between their bodies.

Looking back, he wonders if he could ever have changed the course of fate. If something could have knocked their heads together and made them understand what they meant when ‘ _I need the algorithm_ ’ meant something else entirely.

 

His first lit course’s professor had bellowed once, _mene mene_ something, something from the Bible about being weighed and found wanting, something about the fact that your days were numbered. Chris wonders if there is such a thing as fate at all, sometimes, about hollow souls and the tragedy of them, and thinks that Mark’s days were numbered when Eduardo came up to them with a stupid hat and a tropical shirt.

  

Chris once took a course on radical poetry, which was taught by a woman esesntially in love with Gertrude Stein. He doesnt really remember much about the course - he doesn’t even think he saw a syllabus - but he slurs, on a drunken Wednesday, _a rose is a rose is a rose_ to Dustin two days before the function. 

“Wha?” Dustin squints at him through a half-empty glass and Chris wants to cry from laughing.

“A rose,” he hiccups. “Is a rose, is a rose.”

“What’s a rose?” Dustin asks, but the laugh torn out of him tells Chris that he understood, that Chris has finally fucking taught him something about poetry. Dustin keeps laughing until he coughs, and they drain their glasses, contemplating the burn of alcohol. And roses.

“Wardo is Wardo is Wardo,” Dustin finally says, mouth squashed against the empty glass.

“’s right,” Chris agrees. “And Mark is Mark.”

“Yeah. Mark’s always been Mark.” Chris slumps, and thinks distantly to himself that the next day will be a bitch upon arrival.

 

_(About suffering, they were never wrong_

_The old masters._ )

 

The function on Friday is a suit and tie event, a fundraiser to build new schools and payroll teachers in foreign countries. Little children stabbing at keyboards, that kind of thing. Chris and Dustin are there to, on all costs, to keep Mark and Eduardo apart (which is situational irony, Chris reminds Dustin. Dustin replies back with a Futurama clip). Mark shows up in dark jeans and his usual shoes.

_Do you know what’s cool? A billion dollars._

Chris is so, so tired. He’s spent the week wrangling his Thursday hangover plus messages and emails, people asking about press releases about updates and _where is Facebook going now?_ and Dustin trying to imitate Wardo’s potential movements so they could whisk away Mark at a moment’s notice. He’s tired, and while he’s rubbing his temples and Dustin is in the bathroom, Mark sidles up to Wardo.

 

_Alert, alert!_ His mind shrieks, in a voice uncannily similar to Dustin’s during finals. Chris stays put, stares at them over the fundraiser’s marketing flyers as if reading them, and watches as the tide roars, _pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, at their return upon the strand_. 

They are civil to each other, at least. They’re clinically separate, and Wardo no longer leans in toward Mark they way they used to ( _neither joy, nor love, nor light_ ). Chris tries to sneak away quietly toward Dustin, who is coming out of the bathroom and about to stumble on their mutual ex-friends. 

 

It could end up okay. They’re talking, and it’s a start. “Come with me,” he hisses, grabbing Dustin’s elbow and yanking him away from the fundraiser.

“Christopher, I’m a married woman,” Dustin protests, and it’s not cute (because Armageddon is on their heels, because Mark and Eduardo are talking and Chris is going to die of cardiac arrest). “Wait, is that - “

“Yes,” he says hurriedly. “And they’re not about to murder each other in public.”

They spend the rest of the fundraiser hiding behind massive plastic trees (Dustin dubs them ‘fake-us, the fake ficuses”) and spying. Chris resists the temptation to barrel roll down a marbled hallway and hum the Mission Impossible theme song.

 

There’s a picture that Chris wishes he took in college, because the years are eroding the details of his memory. It’s Mark, sleeping with his mouth open like the overgrown baby he is, with a quiet peace about him that Chris so rarely sees. Mark Zuckerberg has always been defined by the quirks of his actions, by the rapidfire typing and speaking habits that he nursed, like the points of rapiers, to weaponize his skills and wits until it bulldozed down everyone around him.

The thing about this mental picture is that Chris very secretly guards it (secretly, because he’s not Mark’s mom, nor is he a creeper like Dustin). Gentility is something that doesn’t come easily from Mark. It’s an innate thing, the softness of his face so apparent. It proves that Mark is human and capable of relaxing, of revealing an innocence that the rest of his life would try to strip away.

Vulnerability is not a quality common in prophets or punks. But that’s the Mark Chris thinks about, even at _Welcome to Facebook_ and _I’m CEO, bitch_.

 

In college (post-California, post-burning scarf, post-Mark), Chris took a creative writing workshop and was one out of five guys in his class. He wrote sincerely, had winced at the red marks circling semicolon misuse and sentences displaying a lack of structural clarity. He tries to remember what his professor said about emotional honesty then, and thinks that Mark should have taken that class.

Not that it would do him much good now. Chris and Dustin peel themselves away from the fake-us forest when Eduardo leaves Mark standing next to an unsympathetic column, bearing champagne flutes. Their conversation had started civil and ended cold, with Mark shuffling his feet.

 

“Mark.“ Chris reaches out to touch Mark on the shoulder, when he feels Mark instinctively twitch away from him. “Mark, what - “ He stops, because the look on Mark’s face is the most vulnerable he’s seen him in years. They take him home. Install him on the living room sofa. Mark follows until Dustin stands up to fish out a few glasses from the kitchen. 

“Just go home,” Mark says quietly, as he straightens his shoulders. Dustin clinks the glasses on the kitchen counter, the sound echoing hollow in the darkened house. Chris and Dustin leave his house and try to remember how to breathe. ( _Here we go ‘round the prickly pear, here we go ‘round the prickly pear_.) When Chris finally comes home, he tries not to think about the half-empty glass. A rose is a rose. Is a rose.

 

Mark doesn’t fall in love the way most people do. Mark isn’t like most people at all--and doesn’t care. He never wanted to be like other kids, has never needed that validation. So it comes to no surprise that he doesn’t quite fall in love: rather, he finds himself already there, slipping into that with an ease of heart that belies comfortable practice.

He argues that he has never been good at chess, since nobody taught him. It’s true. Mark doesn’t engage himself in degrees. He goes all-in. Victory or nothing. Mark doesn’t know the meaning of the word ‘risk,’ but Wardo lives in fear of it.

(Every character needs a tragic flaw. Every story needs catharsis. Chris doesn’t know where his closure will come from, but the ebb and flow of the play he’s in is tiring him, exhausting him. Mark is too blind and Wardo is too bright, and their flames burnt down _the cactus land_. It’s not a good play, Chris might argue. Aristotle doesn’t reply quickly enough.)

 

The Monday following the fundraiser, Mark is back in the office, barking at programmers and coding furiously. Dustin doesn’t look anyone in the eye, shying away from Mark’s office and using the office email address for short messages while Chris wraps up the fundraiser’s aftermath with a press release and a pleasant series of external memos. He makes no mention of Wardo at all, and studiously tries not to think about Mark, about how his eyes still followed Wardo out of the room.

(He did that throughout college, and even during the depositions. Mark sometimes looked away, but when Wardo entered a room and left it, Mark always watched him _come and go_.)

 

Weeks fly by, and when Mark recieves an invitation to attend as a keynote speaker for an industry conference, Chris forwards it to Mark with a _?_ attached.

The hollowness in his eyes is lessened, but there are dark circles now that make it hard to look away from his face. Chris winces when he sees Mark, coding grimly in his office in a threadbare sweatshirt.

_we’ve got to do something_ , Dustin texts.

Mark responds back with an affirmative. Chris puts away his phone. He prepares a small announcement to the heads of department, a little _Save the Date!_ message about the conference and the resulting entourage of people Mark will probably need to bring.

The people hosting the conference owe him a few favors, he thinks, and he might be able to call one in. After a brief exchange of charming emails, he texts Dustin back.

_wardo’s going to the conference._

 

The conference is three months away, far enough for people to assume it doesn’t exist on their immediate schedules. Chris, after a long experience with such delusions, begins planning in advance. He makes sure Mark gets a good room at the host hotel, and also discreetly (as in, through three different people) ensures Wardo’s reservation is on the same floor.

“He’s going to kill you,” Dustin whispers. “Wardo is going to murder you - I always knew he had it in him."

“He doesn’t know I did it!” Chris protests, because it’s true. He knows a guy, who dated a guy, who likes this girl (and has incriminating stories of the time the second party’s drunken hazing went terribly, nakedly awry).

“He’ll find out! He is going to find out and he is going to kill us with his bare hands.”

 

Dustin sends him ASCII images of an approximate Wardo (Chris can tell by the hair) holding a knife to fill up his inbox. Chris deletes them all after looking at them, casually impressed at Dustin’s ASCII talent for the first few messages. He registers the Facebook delegation and quietly asks around for a presumptive list of registered attendees. Chris searches for one familiar name, and finds it there, nestled among the hundreds.

As the conference looms closer, Mark grows moodier. Dustin’s murderous Wardo art gets closer, too, the ASCII blade growing ever larger. Chris thinks he can make out a little stick figure of himself in the foreground.

 

The hotel rooms are spacious enough that Chris feels comfortable tossing his bag in his room without messing up the space. He digs out his laptop and keeps the suitcase on the spare bed, eyeing the curtains before deciding to leave them open. Chris tucks in his keycard in his pocket and shuts the door, walks three feet and knocks on the door next to his.

Dustin’s voice floats out from the room. “Who is it?”

“It’s me,” Chris says, and he can hear Dustin tumbling from somewhere to reach for the door.

“I fell off the bed,” he says quickly, and Chris laughs at him.

 “I have the conference program.” He holds up his laptop and Dustin’s face splits into a smile. 

 

Eduardo is not presenting anything. His people are not presenting anything, and he is not promoting anything or anyone. Neither Chris nor Dustin can figure out why he’s attending. When they meet up for dinner, they don’t mention it to Mark. 

 

There are some things that Chris just doesn’t know. He is not, after all, omniscient--he tries to be as objective in perspective as possible--but sometimes, the inherent bias is too obvious to overcome.

He doesn’t know why Eduardo is attending at all: after all, the conference program proudly stated Mark Zuckerberg, keynote speaker. It was in the news, it was in the headlines. He thinks back to the ill-fated fundraiser, the night Mark looked like he’d ached from emptiness, and thinks that an omniscient narrator might know what they’d talked about before Wardo had turned on his heel and left Mark there.

He thinks about room 1435, and the occupant in 1478.

 

The conference itself is as standard as they went. Promising young things, stupid young things, blend themselves together among the exhibitions of technology and programming advances. Some people threw themselves into the pathway of Mark’s attention, and some people just shook hands. Dustin folded himself into a conversation about a new method of coding web applications, and Chris takes an hour for himself in his room. He has three days of this conference, he reasons. Someone knocks.

He hasn’t ordered room service. When Chris opens the door, he knows that room 1435 is empty. Room 1435 is empty because Wardo is standing in front of his room, arms crossed and mouth pulled into a tight frown. He hasn’t talked to him in years. “Um. Hello - “  

“You did this,” Wardo accuses him, pushing himself into his room and closing the door shut. “Mark is on the same floor as me somehow, Chris, I know you did something. I saw him, and he saw me.”

Belatedly, Chris realizes that this Wardo is eerily similar to Dustin’s ASCII art. “I didn’t organize this conference,” he tries, but it’s a shitty defense and he knows it. So much for Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“You know people who know people. You did this.” 

Chris spreads his hands out in a gesture of peace. He’s seen it work before, maybe. (On an episode of Star Trek that Dustin was mouthing the lines to, because Captain Kirk wanted to show that he came in peace, and was up to nothing but good when found seducing nubile alien women, or something.) It doesn’t really work, because Wardo saw that episode too.

“I don’t talk to you for two years, and you accuse me of trying to ruin this conference?” It’s a better shot, but Chris knows Wardo can wrangle Dustin’s mother better than anyone. 

Wardo just looks tired. He looks as tired as Chris feels, and suddenly, Chris is awash with guilt. “I stopped talking to you because,” Wardo starts, voice quiet. “Because I didn’t know how to anymore.” The silence in the room is heavy.

Chris wants to ask _then why are you here? Why did you accept the invitation to come? Why are you here, after years of nothing?_

 

“I’ll get someone to switch your room,” he manages. “I’m sorry.”

Wardo scoffs, the sound huffing in Chris’ ear. “I’ll keep the room. You can keep your favors.” When he leaves the room, Chris’ eyes follow him out.

Wardo’s shoulders are unbowed and straight, but look brittle.

 

The thing about it was that, when Wardo sued his best friend for millions of dollars, it wasn’t about the money. It was never about the money.

 

( _This is the way the world ends_  
This is the way the world ends  
This is the way the world ends--  
Not with a bang, but a whimper.)

 

When the first day of the conference wraps up, Chris pulls Dustin out of his room. “We’re going out,” he says, because Wardo knows where Chris’ room is and will smother him in his sleep.

He tells Dustin about the conversation, about how he wanted to ask Wardo why he was there, why he was attending at all, but didn’t - and Dustin listens and nurses his drink. When they go back to the hotel, Dustin follows Chris in and mumbles to himself about flowers, curling up on the second bed. Chris lays down among and tries to hazily remember something about _a boy, falling from the sky_.

 

The second day of the conference dawns on Chris, who is still sleeping with his phone still clutched in his hand. It is an ungodly six in the morning. Dustin still snores as loudly as he did when they were in school. He blearily opens his eyes and stares blankly at the screen, which cheerily informs him that he has one text message from _Mark Zuckerberg (cell)_. 

Chris opens the message, and reads the one word.

 

_What_.

 

  
He rubs his eyes and tries not to wince at the movement of his tongue against yesterday’s teeth. Chris sits vaguely upright in bed and begins scrolling through his text history. When he finds Mark’s entry on his phone, he groans. Dustin sympathetically snuffles into a pillow.

 

_i am never without it(anywhere you go, my dear; and whatever is done by only me is your doing_  

_i loved you first: but afterwards your love outsoaring mine, sang such a loftier song_

_like an onion mark an onion_

_it will blind you with tears like a lover it wil make your reflection a wobbling photo of grief_

_dont be a sad onion mark_

_a glimpse through an interstice caught_

 

Chris tries to remember if Dustin was there when he began texting poetry quotes. He thinks he was, because he remembers a loud laugh about his drunken parentheses use. It probably means Dustin was texting Mark, too. 

He drags himself out of bed and crawls atop Dustin’s, searching for his phone. When Chris finds it, he sends a small prayer to the god of small social indecencies, and unlocks Dustin’s phone to read through his text history.

 

_chrs sas ur a sad inion makr_

_u kno_

_waordo is still ward o makr_

_mark_

_haha onion_

 

Chris shuts off Dustin’s phone and sighs in relief when the little bright screen flickers away. This conference couldn’t be over fast enough.

 

They meticulously stay sober on the second and third days, because Chris cannot live with himself after texting romantic poetry quotes to Mark on behalf of his estranged ex-best friend. When the conference winds down and Mark delivers his speech, Chris surreptiously looks around to see that Wardo is not there in the room at all. 

He excuses himself, and catches Dustin’s eye when he leaves the room (and texts quickly, to _stay there_ and not draw attention). Chris hurries to the concierge’s desk, and asks if room 1435 is still occupied. 

“Yes,” the concierge says confusedly, batting polite eyelashes. Chris thanks her and tries not to look too suspicious coming back in the main ballroom where Mark is finishing up.

 

Mark hasn’t mentioned the texts, and Chris doesn’t bring it up, either. Chris is fairly sure Mark spent the three days either in the conference as an attendee, or staying inside his room. The final presentations give the conference a few hours’ worth of time, and Chris’ reservations expire tomorrow. When the speech over, Mark disappears to his room again.

Chris knows from experience that the third day of Mark coding usually meant he hadn’t eaten anything substantial in a while. He’s about to knock and ask if he wants a sandwich when he hears voices.

 

If Chris were an omniscient narrator, he would know that room 1435 is empty again, because its occupant is standing in room 1478. If Chris were an omniscient narrator, he would know that Mark does not fall in love like most people. That Mark, once he'd fallen in love, never really recovered from it.

 

The chasm between them sometimes is electric, and sometimes frigid. Wardo and Mark no longer, they are occupants of room 1435, investor and venture capitalist, and occupant of 1478, CEO of Facebook. Once upon a time, they broke each other’s hearts and paid out in millions for it. 

 

Chris remembers reading Kant in college and hating while admiring the way he wrote, the symmetrical style of his words that spelled out the qualities of aesthetics. He remembers that Kant wrote, once, about the fundamental force of moral duties and the commandment of wills, and how those words stayed immortal in his mind. The universal and the humane.

He also remembers trying to talk about it in their suite, trying to make sense of the layered translations and the hypothetical imperatives versus the categorical ones, how Wardo listened and Dustin and Mark tried warring with each other on video game consoles. 

 

If Mark were an omniscient narrator, he might have heard Eduardo’s angry voice and read between his lines. He might have understood the _you can’t use people as a means to an end_ , _Mark_ that Wardo breathes in while exhaling out the _you left me when I needed you_.

 Chris hears their voices and closes his eyes. Everyone is always blind to something.

 

( _between the emotion and the response  
_ _lies the Shadow_.)

 

The days after the conference are hard. Mark, Dustin, and Chris are not quite on speaking terms, and they are swamped with work when a bug nearly threatens to crash the site. They are all sleep deprived, snapping at each other, communicating only through terse internal emails.

Nobody brings up Wardo at all.

Chris changes his bland desktop background to a high quality Delacroix print. He changes it again to Twombly, to Klee, to Gainsborough, to Johns, to Renoir. Then, he changes it back to the first. A calm lake and generic ridges of mountaintops, a fog misting over the glassy water.

 

Changes come slowly.

Mark cautiously opens up again, and Dustin and Chris resume their usual habits quietly, but surely. Months after the crash scare and the conference, Chris’ phone pings with a text message alert.

_It’s Eduardo. I’m in town. Do you have time?_

Chris hesitates to respond, thinks about Eduardo’s unbowed shoulders at the hotel. About catharsis, about hope.

 

_lunch?_

 

_(“hope” is the thing with feathers.)_

 

Ever since Chris has started out at Facebook, he has never been on vacation. The lassitude of it is fatiguing him, and after the sixth repeated email to a thickheaded tech reporter, Chris snaps. “I’m taking my vacation time,” he announces, strolling into Mark’s office.

 Mark takes a long, steady look at his public relations officer and sighs. “Yeah.”

 “I’ll be gone for two weeks.”

“That’s a long time to be gone.”

 “Be lucky it isn’t a month,” Chris says, but the smile on his face feels half-automatic, half-authentic.

Before Chris leaves the office, Mark stops him. “Hey.” He turns. From Chris’ first person view, Mark looks vulnerable again--as if he will say something between the lines.

 

He doesn’t. Mark offers him a quiet smile, and Chris smiles back, more genuinely than before. “Thanks, Mark,” he says. When he walks out, he keeps his back straight.

 

Chris stops by Dustin’s desk to inform him about the break, and Dustin throws his arms around his waist like a limpet. “Get off me,” he laughs, and Dustin digs in further. 

“I’m going to walk into my office like this, and I’m going to brain you with my stapler.”

“You don’t have a stapler, Christopher! I know it for a fact that it’s broken, because your assistants always go next door to use the automatic one. Why do you get cute assistants,” he whines, as Chris is reaching for Dustin’s mouse so he can hit him with it. “Ow, ow -“ he lets go quickly enough, and Chris punches him in the shoulder for good measure.

 

After he informs his department, he sets his automatic email replies and goes home. Chris packs his clothes methodically, and books a one-way flight to North Carolina.

It’s good to be home.

 

Chris settles in among the bookshelves and reads, reads to his heart’s content. Tuchmann, McCullough, Milton, he reads familiar titles and tries out new ones. He carefully wipes off the dust accumulated over older books in the house and quotes them softly to himself. When his family gathers at the table for dinner, he laughs and feels lighthearted in a way he hasn’t felt in a long time. 

After a week at home, he flies to New York.

 

Museum Mile is a good way to spend the time. Monets and van Eycks stare back at him through the years, and when he leaves every museum he always visits the gift shop.

He purchases small postcards with famous pantings on them, buys the Duchamp Mona Lisa print for Dustin and a photorealistic Reche for Mark. He stops at the MOMA store’s large rack of postcards and thoughtfully picks out a few for himself: a dreamy Rossetti and, after thinking about it, a blue Rothko.

Sometimes, shades of blue remind him of theFacebook. He picks up more of them: a Lichtenstein print, a Stieglitz photograph, a Georgia O’Keefe postcard reminiscient of the giant one that hung ominously in the sex and gender studies section of the undergraduate library. Tolouse-Latrec. Picasso. He mails them all to a familiar address, and wonders if the mail interns will sort them out correctly.

 

Chris does not expect to meet Eduardo in New York. At five in the afternoon, he comes out of Starbucks holding a coffee and looks across the street to see Wardo looking back.

The traffic blurs into a multicolored barrier and Chris could cry from laughing.

Wardo’s mouth stretches into a small smile, and motions to ‘hold on,’ while he crosses the street. “I didn’t know you were in New York,” he says, and Chris almost feels defensive.

“I took a vacation,” he shrugs. The motion is nearly Marklike. 

“You could have told me,” Wardo adds. “I’ll be here for the month, talking to a few people. Let me know if …”

“I’ll let you know when I’m free,” Chris supplies. The postcards feel heavy on his mind, and when Wardo leaves with a bright nod and ducks into the crowds, Chris goes back to his museums pensively.

 

 

The next selection of postcards are noticeably different: Van Gogh, Miro, Seurat. The prints he chooses have blurry outlines and hazy shapes, and Chris sometimes can see people that way. Blurry outlines and hazy motivations, Wardo talking to Chris and breaking Mark’s heart. Mark staying in Palo Alto, and Chris strolling in the Guggenheim.

(The omniscient narrator knows that Mark keeps the postcards, every single one. Dustin buys a massive bulletin board and they pin them all up. When the Post-Impressionists come in a single bundle, omniscient eyes see Mark pinning them up, all except one.

  _Mark - he’s here in New York_ , it reads on the back of a Cezanne, and that one Mark keeps for himself.)

 

After a week spent in a city so focused on itself (in a way unlike California, its thriving bustle so different to the edge of the West Coast), Chris feels like a different person. It feels easier to be Chris Hughes, somehow, and when he flies back to Palo Alto it’s easy to greet Dustin and his assistant with wave and a smile.

(The omniscient narrator knows that, while Chris and Eduardo have been cautiously avoiding subjects with depth, conversations with any triggers at all, Chris has been wrestling with questions and Eduardo with too many answers. When Chris finally asks--

_why did you go to the conference?_

\--Eduardo answers back.  _Because I wanted to see him._ )

 

Chris digs out his old Matthew Arnold notes and mails a single sheet back to Eduardo’s New York address. He writes neatly on it a few lines: _Thanks for the company. It was great to see you._ and posts it off, waits for a response. 

He tells Dustin about the single sheet and when Dustin laughs, Chris hides his face in embarrassment. “Actual cupid Chris Hughes,” Dustin wheezes. “Liberal arts education!"

 

( _Ah, love let us be true_

_To one another!_ )

 

_Catharsis_ doesn’t come in a wave of denouement. Chris realizes this when, months after his two-week vacation, Mark’s phone vibrates with a text during a meeting. Few things can pry Mark’s attention away from Facebook, but when he receives the message his face blooms in something that looks like a smile.

_how long has mark been dating a mysterious person?_

Chris emails Dustin, who replies back with a Japanese emoticon that probably signals confusion.

_¯\\_(ツ)_/¯_

 

The thing about adulthood, Chris sometimes thinks, is that nothing can prepare you for it. When you’re young enough to see the world for its vastness, it’s the little details that matter. It’s the way Wardo spent time leaning against Mark, the way Mark wasn’t when he was sitting across the table from Wardo, the things he didn’t do that said more than the things he did. The little things, like the way Wardo’s eyes burned when he smashed Mark’s laptop in the office, the way his voice was threatening to crack, these little things acculmulate like dust atop each other, layer by layer.

When you’re young, you live for the details.

Like shades of color. Klein and ultramarine and celestial blue, melding together on a canvas like an emotive Rothko. But when you grow up, the fact remains that it’s blue. Things become blunter, become shorter. Mark, the omniscient narrator knows, can’t see the forest for the trees, but Wardo has been looking at the forest the whole time.

Or perhaps it is the other way around.

 

When Mark continues to wear this peculiar expression when his phone buzzes with texts, Dustin wrestles Chris into trying to steal his phone to read them.

“I don’t read people’s texts,” he hisses at Dustin--to which, Dustin only raises an eloquent eyebrow. “I don’t usually read people’s texts,” Chris amends. “And I’m sorry about the last time.”

“It’s not a usual situation!” Dustin dismisses his attempt at social kindness. “Mark is out of the office for another five minutes, at least. And I happen to know that the cafeteria line today is pretty long."

“It’s not beneath Mark to cut in line for a tuna sandwich,” Chris reminds him, because _I’m CEO, bitch_.

“He can’t teleport,” Dustin waves his hands. “I say we go in there and see for ourselves why Mark is making squishy faces at the phone. Maybe he has pictures.” Neither of them are prepared for the sequence of messages that they see.

 

(The omniscient narrator knows that, on a Saturday evening, Eastern Standard Time, a familiar phone number texts Mark a single message.

 

_“Hope” is the thing with feathers_  
 _That perches on the soul--  
_ _And sings the tune without the words--  
_ _And never stops--at all--_ )

 

Mark finds the path through closure when Wardo's texts become phone calls, become Skype chats, become Facebook friends. When Wardo comes to California he tries to teach Mark to see the forest, and can sometimes taste hope on the tongue.

The omniscient narrator observes Chris's catharsis when they come over to Mark's house and the heartache between them is eased by a familiar arm slung across Mark's shoulder again. Dustin's catharsis comes when he hacks into Wardo's email chains to see sappy messages, stupid faces and _:)_ s, gentle reminders. Roses are roses.

**Author's Note:**

> Quotations are sourced from, in order, _Charlie and the Chocolate Factory_ , Roald Dahl; 'Dover Beach', Matthew Arnold; 'Sailing to Byzantium', by William Yeats; _A Tale of Two Cities_ , by Charles Dickens; _Anna Karenina_ , Leo Tolstoy; the 'Book of Daniel', _Tender Buttons_ , Gertrude Stein; 'Musee des Beaux Arts', Wystan Auden; 'The Hollow Men', Thomas Eliot; _Poetics_ , Aristotle; 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', Thomas Eliot; 'carry it in my heart', e. e. cummings; 'i loved you first: but afterwards your love …', Christina Rosetti; 'a glimpse', Walt Whitman; '"Hope" is the thing with feathers', Emily Dickinson.


End file.
